


And For You... (Can't Let You Destroy)

by navaan



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: AI Tony Stark, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Character Death, Evil, Fix-It of Sorts but not really, Heavy Angst, Hydra Steve Rogers, M/M, Sad Ending, Secret Empire (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-01
Updated: 2018-03-01
Packaged: 2019-03-25 17:52:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13839942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/navaan/pseuds/navaan
Summary: He's an AI now - not human. And Steve has betrayed them all. How is an Artificial Intelligence to cope when it still feels the betrayal?





	And For You... (Can't Let You Destroy)

**Author's Note:**

> Evil. Be warned. People heart problems should not ride this roller coaster of this fic. This isn't my usual bittersweet.
> 
> Ties in with Secret Empire #1 and #2 - and stuff.
> 
> Written for the Cap-IronMan Alphabet Challenge prompt A - _AI_ and (my Bingo card prompt) _Apology_.
> 
> Thank you so much faite for looking it through last minute! You're a savior!

Tony used the glove to pick up a screwdriver. The tool looked lost in his robotic Iron Man hand.

He longed to close his own fingers around it. 

For the more delicate work hands were the best.

But he had no real hands. 

Not anymore.

In essence he was nothing but a series of binary machine codes, executing one of the processes that allowed him to project his holographic interface; that he could use the interface to move around the armor and _did_ so even now was an unnecessary indulgence that put more strain on his computing power than he was going to admit to any of the humans around. Mostly these days he was storing his own program in the armor and sometimes his processes slowed down so bad he sounded drunk even to his own no longer tangible ears.

He didn't care.

He was the copy of a human consciousness. Much of Tony Stark's experiences had been centered around having a body, on getting physical and his hands dirty in the workshop.

He missed that.

As far as it could be true for an AI he missed the body.

"Mr. Stark?" Riri asked. He could see in her eyes that she was worried and that got more of his processes running than Clint calling him “the drunk”. She was young, so young, and she should have a better life than hiding with him and what was left in the non-Hydra world. Had he ever been this young? He couldn’t remember. In this unaging state, it all seemed unfathomable.

Riri was so much younger than Tony Stark had been when he had started this own superhero life - and this was her first big crisis.

At the same time it was the worst crisis Tony had ever seen. This was the worst betrayal. He shouldn’t know what betrayal felt like, not in this state, but something about the memory data banks he had access to insisted on endlessly replaying key scenes from the life he’d lived, key scenes that all related to one person and one person only.

_Steve._

"Clint is right. You kids should stay out of sight," he said roughly. “You could get hurt. Hydra has no reason at all to let any of you get away.”

"I'm sorry," she said and she sounded contrite, but at the same time, like she would do it again any day of the week.

That was very much like Tony Stark had sounded like when he was alive.

Had that been what being Tony Stark had been all about? He thought he remembered, but he _wasn't_ Tony Stark.

_That's what you'd tell, Steve, right?_

But Tony Stark had given him a mission. He was to protect and teach Riri.

Riri Williams was better and smarter than the living, breathing Tony Stark had ever been at that age, and she had a chance to be so much more… If they could get her out of this alive. And Tony wanted her to have all the support she needed to do just that. He remembered he had wanted to do that when he was alive, too. This was his chance at a better legacy. But back here in the headquarter Clint and Natasha had built for what was left of the country's heroes, it was becoming harder and harder to find a solution for their Hydra problem.

_He was always the best of us. Now look at him, taking us apart limb by limb._

Tony used the Iron Man gauntlet to grab for a different tool and saw it shaking. The whole gauntlet was just shaking. He needed to calibrate again. But it had been steadily getting worse with every recalibration.

And Riri was standing right there, watching him with a pinched expression. “You know you look like a depressed mess? Is that really part of the recalibration? The messy beard? You keep saying it is, but...”

“Sorry,” he said and saw Riri frown. He'd been apologizing a lot lately.

Malfunctioning. He was malfunctioning.

“It’s okay,” she said. “He was your best friend. Everyone gets why you're...”

She was the second person that day who had told him that, so his algorithms brought up the appropriate answer before the conversation could be dragged out: “It was complicated. Steve and I – that was _always_ complicated.” Somehow the last thing his memory banks had dug up was him feeling elated and happy to have Steve at his back while he got ready to oppose Carol. To be for once on the same side of a superhero disagreement had meant a lot to Tony Stark and the memory of it had been filed under “very important”.

So had the sudden turn when Steve had accused him of being paranoid and drinking.

 _He doesn’t trust you. Why should Steve ever trust you?_ , was the thought attached to that memory.

Now he knew that it had been more complicated then too. The truth of the matter was that everybody had trusted Steve, and nobody should have.

He called up the rest of the armor, but not the helmet, to hide the shaking behind the immovable shell of Iron Man. He had enough doubts. If he’d still had a body, he would have sighed with relief the moment the armor closed around him. He didn't need to make everyone doubt him even more and he didn't want to scare Riri. He watched her watch him and then turned back to his work.

The following silence was a blessing. He had work to do. For Riri. For what was left of the Avengers. What was left of the world.

Suddenly arms were around him. He couldn’t feel it, but his sensory readings gave him all the information; readings of pressure points and body heat were all a hug was to him now. He took stock, froze in mid-motion and looked over his shoulder to see what she was doing. Riri had thrown herself at his back like he was a human being, like he needed comfort.

He wasn’t. He wasn’t a human being. Not anymore. He had no real body, even if some of the characteristic urges had been built into him when the transfer happened. The sudden upload had been messy and fast. It was to be expected.

“Sorry,” Riri said and stepped away. She wasn’t much for emotional displays either. “If he'd been important to me like that, I'd be sad too. I thought you could use a hug.” She sniffed and frowned.

“I’m an AI,” he said. “I don’t have feelings.”

She looked at him then, long and hard and with eyes too smart and old for a teenager. “Yeah, sure. We both know why you’re stuck in the holographic interface body.”

They shared a look, both acknowledging that they knew a bit too much about each other now to lie about what was obvious.

But he refused to say it out loud.

_I miss it. I miss my body. I miss being Tony Stark. I miss the world as it used to be. I remember Steve as he was. What kind of futurist looks back all the time?_

He picked up the fallen glove and went back to his work.

He hadn’t found a solution to their main problem. He was sure there wouldn’t be one. All variables had been gone through, all options tried and tested. Steve was not a clone, not a Skrull and not mind-controlled. Tony had run all the available data again and again and everything pointed to one answer and one answer only.

Steve had turned. Steve _was_ who he was now. Had _always_ been.

_When he smiled at you. When he clapped your shoulder. When you wanted him to kiss you._

“You’re looking like you want to throw up,” a new voice said and only now he turned enough processing power back to the room to see that Riri had left.

Another malfunction.

He needed to reboot soon.

He was an AI. Not human. He couldn’t be slipping like this. He had been uploaded and programmed to protect Riri Williams, to stay and mentor her and help her find her footing in a world that was growing ever more complicated.

Why could he not even fulfill this simple task?

“Natasha,” he said and realized that he had done all scheduled repairs and probably more, but he hadn’t come one step closer to solving the problem at hand.

She watched him with an expression he could identify easily and label as sad and angry. “Look at you,” she said. “You should be the only one here on top of his game, Tony. How can he still hurt you so much?”

He had no breath to get stuck in his throat, no stomach to plummet down to his knees, no heart to miss a beat. And yet he froze, like the hard disc he ran on had been struck by lightning, like his processor had just decided to take a vacation.

"Tony? The boy was here? The kids brought the boy here. Did he drop something off? Something to help us?"

Starting up again as quickly as they’d stopped, his processes running in too many directions at once, he looked down at the work table where he’d dropped the little flash drive earlier. He hadn’t even looked at it yet.

“Yes,” he admitted.

“No good?”

He shrugged. How did an AI admit they were slipping?

“You look worse than you did yesterday? You realize that’s…”

Up until now nobody had dared to say it out loud. They’d gone around inventing scathing nicknames like Clint or showing worry like Riri. “I’m not a standard AI… I’m based on a person’s brainwaves and memories. Memories, Natasha.”

“Right,” Natasha said. “You’re not standard. But you aren't the final image of a dead person either. You weren't _dead_ last time I saw you. Tony’s _body_ was property of SHIELD.”

“Property?” he huffed.

“That's what it says in the lists. Now it is property anyway. Hydra property.”

He didn’t shudder, because he was not fucking human anymore. He didn’t. No, he fucking _didn’t_.

He shuddered.

Natasha noticed and threw a folder down in front of him on the work table. He looked at it, took in the words stamped across it, and then looked at her with the closest equation of a tiredly raised eyebrow he could muster. What she had thrown on the table was all there was to know about Tony’s remains neatly sorted in a SHIELD file.

“They didn’t have it on a USB?” he asked. “Is Steve that fond of the World War II aesthetic?”

“No,” she said and her lips were pinched and her face pale. “I know you, Tony. What I don’t know is what exactly you did to yourself. But you do. You know. You must know where you are. Wake up. We need you. The complete you. The human. Do you hear me?”

“I’m an AI. A digitized consciousness. Tony Stark is dead.”

“Keep telling yourself that. One of the most annoying but most human traits of Tony Stark was his ability to lie to himself on a daily basis. Think about that. Did he program you that well – or do you have his flaws for another reason.”

She left him standing in the middle of the room to mull that over and Tony was close to just shutting himself down for the day and let the world burn. But he stood rooted to the spot, staring at that little disc of information that in his disillusionment he had ignored so far.

Whatever people thought, Steve was beyond saving.

 

Steve had stabbed them all in the back. He'd not just let it happen – he was the supreme leader.

Every time Tony saw him out there in his Captain America uniform instead of his Hydra green, he hated seeing it a bit more.

_He has no right to still go on pretending he's the good guy._

He was never _Steve_ , not the one he thought he knew. But the real Steve? The one that had perhaps never existed? He wouldn't have given up.

So what right did Tony have to give up if perhaps there was a way?

Tony was a bunch of code now. He couldn’t _really_ get drunk. But he remembered enough about Tony Stark and his life to know that if his code would allow for it, he would have a drink in his hand right now.

Finally he used one of the gauntlets to pick up the little plastic square. Even to a thing made of numbers like him it seemed unlikely that something so nondescript would hold the solution to a problem much bigger than all of them.

He accessed the data on a secure hard drive.

In his mind there was no chance that the solution had been dropped in his lap so easily. But the moment the face of Rick Jones appeared, full of his own cheerful conviction and unwavering belief, Tony felt something stir inside of him. “The Cosmic Cube,” Rick explained on the screen. “It’s what gave him back the serum and returned him wrong.”

There it was. The worst possible thing.

Hope.

A chance.

Suddenly there was a chance.

And _that_ was when he finally opened the SHIELD folder Natasha had left him.

* * *

Clint was the easiest to convince. The one thing they could agree on these days was the depth of the betrayal, but out of all the heroes here Clint and Tony were the most likely to do whatever it took to set things right and get the _real_ Steve back.

He ran two system checks, realized his appearance had changed yet again and tried to fix the bit of visual projection code on the fly. Nothing happened on the first try. His projection wavered on the second and one of the gloves fell to the table.

“Tony?”

“Natasha,” he said.

“You look...”

“Worse?”

“Sad.”

“Aren't you?”

Her eyes said: “Not like you.” But Natasha had never been one to dwell on what she couldn't change. What she said instead was: “You and Clint are deluding yourselves.”

“I'm an...”

“You're not,” she cut him off. “You aren't. You're an AI, but you're connected to what's left of your body. When did Friday ever look depressed?”

He flickered. Her words were like a punch.

“Wake up, Tony. Both from this dream and the coma. You have to realize...”

“I do,” he admitted.

She nodded. “Good. You're human. We need you.”

“But that's not why you're here.”

“You can't save him. He's gone. I know you want to, but all the talks about the Cosmic Cube. It won't change what has happened. He's not Steve. He's Hydra. He's the Red Skull with Steve's mind and super soldier body.”

He watched her and knew. They both knew each other too well. She had a plan. She wanted him to give up on Steve and help her.

“I am sorry, Tasha,” he finally said. “Do you think if roles were reversed and there was a chance to save any of us, he'd just give up?”

Her face didn't fall, but she knew she wasn't going to win him over. “You do realize that he wouldn't hesitate to take you down if he thought it was the right thing to do.”

He flickered again, like even this holographic body of blue light and projected pixels was giving out on him. “I know,” he said. “He was always the better man.”

She gritted her teeth and stomped away without giving him another look.

The next day she and the kids were gone – and Riri with them.

* * *

He tried to track them, wallowed in his AI misery for two days.

Then Clint appeared in the workshop. “He's put a hit out on them. Natasha and the kids.”

His heart ached.

“He's coming for us first,” he said with some sadness.

“I know,” Clint said – and it was the most civil they'd been to each other in ages - “that you're not really Tony Stark, but I could use a real plan, Shellhead.”

“I _am_ the man,” Tony admitted, but wasn't sure Clint even heard him until the archer turned around.

“Tell me your plan then, Tony.”

* * *

Two days later Hydra bombed their base to hell and Tony – the sole occupant of the base without a body – stayed behind and held them off to make sure Clint and their friends got away.

“It will be my pleasure to personally blast you to hell, Iron Man.”

“Thanks,” Tony said back, “I knew you cared.” His readings told him Clint was gone, had slipped through Steve's fingers again.

Just for a second something flickered in Steve's eyes. Then the base exploded and armor parts flew in all directions.

* * *

“I killed you today,” Steve said to the sleeping man in the machine. “It wasn't as satisfying as I'd hoped.”

Tony didn't stir and he didn't expect him to. Nodding to himself he stood from his chair and said: “You better wake up, before it's too late. Natasha and the children think they're so clever, but they're not.”

He let a hand glide across the glass above Tony's face.

“They're not you. None of them are. And I have enough of the Cube here to shape the world.”

That Tony had died before he could give him the fight of his life was Steve's biggest regret. For a moment he thought he saw one of Tony's eyelids move, but it must have been a trick of the light. The body was as still as ever.

He went to see Helmut, gave a speech in front of the men. Things today were in order.

But they also knew that part of Tony's little resistance cell had escaped. The fight wasn't over yet, even though the AI had been eradicated.

“We need to act fast. Clint shouldn't be underestimated.”

He hadn't so much as said it when an explosion rocked the Helicarrier.

“What was that?” he barked. “Are we under attack?”

Who dared attack him here? He wondered about his Avengers and about Thor, but he'd seen them this morning. Everything had been under control.

“The explosion happened in the engine room. Deck 5,” one of the men informed him.

“How bad is it?”

“Not a critical...”

A second explosion shook the ship dangerously.

“You were saying?” he asked and let his anger at this attack bleed into his voice.

“Second engine room...”

Men were running, following orders, but the panic was setting in. They'd come under attack in their own headquarter.

Steve grit his teeth.

“Check for intruders.”

“Supreme leader, you should go.”

But he wouldn't be moved. This was his fight. If these were rebels they'd come here to bring the fight to Steve. And he would give it to them.

“Evacuate the pod in prison chamber 45,” he said calmly, “get Sharon...”

One of the men punched in the orders he gave, but he hadn't done more than type a few words before he went pale.

“What?” Steve asked, his anger flaring like a hot inferno.

The man turned the monitor towards. The surveillance footage showed prison chamber 45.

The pod was empty.

“They came for Stark,” he said angrily and stomped forward. He was going to wring Clint's neck if he got to him.

What did they even want to accomplish with Tony's body? Build a new AI?

“Sir?”

“Go,” he ordered his guard. He didn't need them. “Get whoever's attacking us.”

The man stormed off in different directions. Steve abhorred the disorder. Panic was never the friend of strategic action.

He rounded the corner down to the prison corridor when he was grabbed. A stinging pain spread in his shoulder and he grabbed for whoever attacked him, got an arm and pushed the person around and easily against a wall – to come face to face with a ghost.

“Tony?”

“Hi Cap,” Tony said and picked himself up slowly.

“Your friends won't have time to...”

“No friends here. The Helicarrier is slowly self-destructing. I didn't have time to call in reinforcements.”

“Tony!” His gaze was swimming, suddenly he wasn't even sure he was seeing Tony. “What was...”

Tony held up the syringe. He looked apologetic. “Don't worry about it. You won't survive it. Your own scientist made it. I think someone here was planning to take over soon. Hydra, huh? No loyalty.”

Tony sounded terrible like he was close to tears.

He threw up a fist and stumbled, but Tony – in his dark underarmor and looking pale and shaken – stepped away easily.

“What did you do?”

“I'm sorry,” Tony said and his voice was quiet. Steve had to lean against a wall and Tony turned to him.

Whatever it was he'd been injected with, it was shutting him down. He was sliding down the wall, unable to keep himself up.

His gut was on fire, his lungs were hurting worse than he's ever felt, even before the serum..

“Tony, how... are you alive?”

“I decided it was time to wake up,” Tony said and he was walking closer, grabbed his arm, helped him sit down, let him lean against his chest.

He wanted to ask more, wanted to call out, but even breathing hurt.

“I'm sorry, you know?” When he looked up, Tony was crying. “I'm sorry I couldn't save you. I'm sorry I didn't see it sooner... and...” Tony was sobbing.

Steve tried to fight to keep his eyes open. “What did you...”

“I'm sorry this hurts so much. But you would have done it too if it was the only way.”

 _No,_ he thought. _No!_

“I'm so sorry it has to be like this. Clint will put the Cube together,” Tony said. “Perhaps he can save us.”

The sound of footsteps were headed towards them, but Steve couldn't breathe. His men were coming, but it was too late.

“I'm so sorry, Steve.” Tony's tears fell on Steve's face. “I'm so sorry. But you wouldn't want this. You wouldn't want me to let you be this. This isn't you.”

“You...” he heaved.

“Not long, not long now,” Tony promised in tears. “I love you. Clint will get the Cube. Everything’ll be fine.” And then he leaned down to kiss Steve, but Steve was slipping, slipping away, falling deeper into Tony’s embrace. His lungs didn’t want to take air anymore.

And then the corridor went up in flames.

**Author's Note:**

> faite made [EXTREMELY SAD AN BEAUTIFUL ART FOR THIS.](http://hellogarbagetime.tumblr.com/post/171443090869/ihave-been-hung-up-on-and-for-you-cant-let-you) GO AND LOOK IT'S SO AMAZING.
> 
> You can follow me for fic updates on [tumblr](https://navaanwrites.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/navaanwrites). This fic has a post on the tumblr [here](https://navaanwrites.tumblr.com/post/171482671369/and-for-you-cant-let-you-destroy-navaan) in case you want to share it.


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